Mojang is making changes to how redstone works in Minecraft Pocket and Windows 10 Edition

Mojang today announced that they are making changes to the way redstone works in Minecraft Pocket and Windows 10 Edition. They are trying to simplify the peculiarities of redstone without compromising on the power. Minecraft community discovered a bug and called it as a feature called quasi-connectivity. Before Mojang team fixed it, the community showed us its potential, using it to build automatic farming contraptions, flying machines and so much more.

What is quasi-connectivity?

In the PC edition of Minecraft, pistons can receive redstone power from a distance of two blocks when they are placed in a very specific diagonal position, rather than from a block right next to it. But blocks only get updated when something affects adjacent blocks. It means that you can power a piston and then remove the power without the piston detecting it! It puts the piston in this state where it actually needs to be deactivated, but doesn’t know yet. Clever minecrafters exploit that to build elaborate trigger mechanisms known as Block Update Detectors: when something happens to a block next to a piston – like a block being placed or destroyed, gravel falling, fire igniting, rails re-orientating or even cake being eaten – the piston will “wake up”, notice that it isn’t powered any more, retract and trigger something else.

Instead of fixing this bug, now Mojang team is bringing this feature to Minecraft Pocket Edition. They are introducing a new feature called the Observer block. It checks for changes in the environment and, if triggered, switches between emitting a strong signal and an unpowered state. Also, pistons can now push chests and many other things.